this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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What are devs displaced by AI going to do in the future? Is there an actual plan? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
88 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Let's assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed.... What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They're probably gonna laugh at the absurdity of the situation because some new popular language will come along and the AI will be back to pushing out broken code. That, or laugh because the code in well used languages will include a shit ton of vulnerabilities that wouldn't be present if real devs had to double check code before pushing it out to the public.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

back

When did it ever not push out broken code?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In this hypothetical situation?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

In this hypothetical, why would we create new languages? What benefit does that have for AI-gen code?

So either we're going to improve AI-gen to the point where we rely on it, or human devs are still important in which case new languages matter. The main exception here are languages specifically designed for AI, in which case error-rate would go down.

So either AI pushes out broken code and human devs are still important, or AI doesn't push out broken code and new languages aren't valuable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Someone still has to write the instructions. AI might not become a replacement for the engineer, but a more powerful compiler, that is still fed with code written by engineers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, I agree that's the more likely scenario. People seem to worry way too much about AI, when it's really only going to replace junior devs, and only for short-sighted companies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

But I mean many people have already lost their job because AI automated it away.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think both can happen at the same time. There's a lot of fkn nerds out there. (I'm a software developer myself)